


Mirror, Mirror

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Humor, Light Angst, Magical Realism, Romance, Temporary Character Death, True Love's Kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-04 15:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18346316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: Steeling himself for disappointment, he opens his eyes.A dreadfully familiar girl—a dreadfully familiar young woman—is kneeling over him.[ ALTERNATIVELY - harry is snow white, and pansy is a princess. ]





	Mirror, Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. written for my [rare pair march madness](http://provocative-envy.tumblr.com/post/183852173032/results) tournament & based on [this](http://provocative-envy.tumblr.com/post/183680358437/mirror-mirror-harry-potter-x-pansy-parkinson)
> 
> 2\. this is about twice as long as i wanted it to be but sometimes you just have to *clenches fist* abandon your outline
> 
> 3\. in a perfect world this is a 150k word epic and harry is living his best life on the run in a cozy little cottage/abandoned water mill with ron & hermione, tending to his herb garden while an owl and a cat team up to help him bake pies
> 
> 4\. alas
> 
> ANYWAY PLEASE ENJOY THE FRUITS OF MY LABOR, COMMENTS/KUDOS ARE VERY APPRECIATED, ETC, ETC
> 
> xoxo

* * *

 

Harry’s first thought when he wakes up isn’t a thought so much as a feeling.

A mood.

A suspicion.

A general, mostly unfocused awareness of the soft, dew-damp grass seeping into the fine white linen of his shirt, and the high-pitched, melodic chirping of the birds in a nearby tree, and the burning, telltale ache scratching at his throat, his lungs, his windpipe, like he’d been choked, like he’d been _suffocated_ , and was only just now able to breathe again.

It’s . . . wrong.

He doesn’t quite remember why, but his head is spinning and his lips are tingling, and it’s the latter that has him nervous.

_Worried._

Magic always leaves a trace, Harry knows that better than almost anyone, and he isn’t so disoriented that he doesn’t understand, on some level, what must have happened. He has the jagged jigsaw fragments of a memory—an old woman in a threadbare black cloak, a shallow wicker basket full of gleaming red apples, an eerily personal cautionary tale about a noble, nameless knight and his bride daring to defy Fate once, twice, _thrice_ , before their luck ran out and even True Love couldn’t save them—

Harry inwardly grimaces.

Because magic always leaves a trace.

Because _True Love_ always leaves a trace.

Steeling himself for disappointment, he opens his eyes.

A dreadfully familiar girl—a dreadfully familiar young woman—is kneeling over him.

Her gown is a floaty, expensive-looking confection of white and gold and silver, of silk and satin and lace and gleaming, beribboned clusters of pearls; she has dark hair and blue eyes and a small, peach-pink rosebud of a mouth that’s at transparent, remarkable odds with the rest of her features, sharp and narrow and slightly too angular to be beautiful.

Her expression is strange, too, Harry thinks in a depressing daze of resignation—more frightened than smug, less shrewd than stunned—and it flickers with a brief twinge of sadness, of _regret,_ before clearing altogether, creases of concern smoothing themselves out to be replaced by what he’s _used to_ , from her.

Scorn.

Apathy.

Impatience.

A not insignificant undercurrent of resentment and bitterness and _anger_.

“Well, well, well,” Pansy Parkinson drawls. “The King was right. You _are_ alive.”

“Despite his best efforts, yeah,” Harry snaps, wincing at the scrape of his vocal chords.

Parkinson hums. “But _thanks_ to mine.”

“What?”

A coolly condescending smile plays at the corners of her lips. “Surely, Harry, I don’t need to explain to you, of all people, the power of _True Love’s_ kiss?”

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t, is the thing.

 

* * *

 

Harry is careful not to overreact.

Or—react.

Act.

Rather, he lopes off into the woods to collect a rabbit from one of his snares, stopping by the river to wash the blood off his hands, and takes deep, calming breaths of fresh, loamy air to quell his rising panic, his rising confusion, because there’s Fate being fickle, and there’s Fate being funny, and then there’s Fate being whatever _this_ is.

Cruel.

Unfair.

_Dumb._

The river water is frigid, crystal-clear and icy-cold, and it numbs his fingers, sends goosebumps skittering up his forearms, leaves him shuddering and annoyingly alert as he stares up at the feathered green canopy of the trees. It’s late now, gradient shades of purple, light and dark, faded and vibrant, beginning to bruise the edges of the sky, a bare-bones skeleton of a constellation—the lion, maybe—twinkling in the distance.

He swallows.

He then climbs to his feet, firmly reminds himself that he isn’t a coward, and marches back to camp.

Where Pansy Parkinson, despite his very best efforts, despite his very worst threats, is still very much _present._

“I could draw you a map back to the castle,” Harry offers, slinging the rabbit down onto a large, flat-topped rock. He doesn’t look over at her as he unsheathes his dagger. “If you’re lost.”

Parkinson’s answering sigh is, in Harry’s opinion, unnecessarily dramatic. “I am not _lost_.”

He grunts, pretending to be engrossed by the rabbit. By the _pelt_ of the rabbit. “If you’re sure.”

“I am.”

“It’s just,” he goes on, with exaggerated nonchalance, “I wouldn’t want you to feel _obligated_. To stay. Here. With me.”

“ _Obligated_ ,” Parkinson echoes, clucking her tongue. She sounds amused. Frustrated? It doesn’t bode well, probably, that Harry can’t tell the difference. Not with her. “What does that _mean_ , exactly?”

He tightens his grip on his dagger. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just curious,” she says defensively.

“About _what?”_

“About what _you_ think qualifies as an _obligation_.”

Harry squints at the sharpened sticks he’s been using as roasting spits, trying to pick out the cleanest of the lot. “It’s—it’s something you don’t _want_ to do, but know that you _have_ to do anyway, isn’t it? Like a vow, or a promise, or—something. A responsibility. Why?”

“I suppose that’s true,” Parkinson muses. “The bit about responsibility, especially.”

“Okay, yeah, but _why?”_

“Why _what?_ ”

“Why are you _asking_ me about—” Harry huffs, snatching up one of the sticks and jamming the end through the rabbit’s mouth. “Nevermind. It really doesn’t matter. Are you hungry?”

“Oh, are you actually intending to _feed_ me? How generous.”

He tosses another log onto the fire, watching the flames jump and crackle. “Speaking of,” he says, much too loudly, “I reckon they’d feed you _much_ better back at the castle.”

“They would, yes.”

“Bet it’s warmer there, too.”

“Almost certainly.”

“More comfortable in, you know, every conceivable way.”

“Quite.”

He deposits the spitted rabbit into the grooves on either side of the rough-hewn roasting rack. “Your dress is going to be _ruined_ ,” he blurts out. “Destroyed. Just—wrecked. See all the mud? And the—the insects? They bite. I swear they bite. You’re going to get _blisters_.”

Parkinson cocks her head and slowly raises an eyebrow. “You _really_ don’t want me here, do you?”

“No,” Harry says honestly, shoulders drooping as he sprawls out on the tree stump closest to the fire, “I really, _really_ don’t.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“ _Why_ don’t you want me?” she needles. “Am I not _beautiful_ enough for you? Is that it?”

“Oh, for the—seriously?” Harry scoffs and presses his lips together, meeting her eyes through the blurry, heat-warped haze above the fire. “ _Why_ , out of all your other, more reliably obvious faults, would you try to bait me into an argument with the one I’m _least likely_ to care about?”

“Bait is for traps, Harry, not arguments,” Parkinson simpers. “Don’t be so paranoid.”

“Don’t be so—” He cuts himself off before his voice can crack. “Are you _stupid?_ Or joking? Or just willfully oblivious?”

She sniffs. “No, but I _am_ hungry. I left the castle _hours_ ago.”

“Then go back,” Harry says flatly. “Nobody’s forcing you to stay here.”

“Yes, well.” Her mouth quirks to one side. “Same to you, I suppose.”

He huffs out a desperate, strangled, disbelieving laugh, chin dropping to his chest. “You—I’m—you _opened the gates!_ You turned me over to the King! He was going to have me executed! I’m literally only here, in the bloody woods, _because_ of you!”

“And you’re also only _literally_ here, _alive_ in the bloody woods, because of _me_ ,” Parkinson retorts, color seeping into her cheeks, furious splotches of hot, radiant pink, and her lips are parted and slick, and her eyes are glittering and sharp, and her breath is short, her chest heaving, the slender silver chain of one of her necklaces catching the firelight, accentuating the scalloped white lace of her petticoat and the soft, corset-high curves of her breasts—

Abruptly, Harry looks away, clearing his throat.

“That isn’t the point,” he grits out.

“ _Yes_ , it _is_.”

“I’m on the run.”

“So?”

“I’m a _fugitive._ ”

“ _So?”_

Harry reaches out to turn the rabbit, movements jerky, and the flames waver and sputter as fat drips down. “So, you shouldn’t _be here_. You should be—at the castle.”

“No, I should be with _you_.”

He snorts. “No, you definitely shouldn’t.”

“Just because you don’t _want_ me to be—”

“Oh, I’m used to not getting what I want, this isn’t about that.”

Parkinson’s nostrils flare. “And what makes you think, then, that _this_ is what _I_ want? That _you’re_ what I want?”

“You’re still here, aren’t you?”

“Because I have to be!” she bleats. “I _can’t_ go back, not without you!”

Harry goes very still. “ _Can’t?_ ”

“Won’t,” she hastily corrects herself. “I _won’t_ go back without you.”

“No. You said _can’t_. Why’s that?”

She lifts her chin. “Why’s what?”

“ _Can’t_ implies inability,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “Inability due to . . . _what?_ A promise? A debt?”

She recoils a bit, blinking and blinking, frantically, rapidly, like a hummingbird beating its wings. “No, no, I just meant—True Love . . . I can’t possibly . . . now that I’ve _found_ you . . .”

“Yeah, you’ve found me,” he agrees, prodding at his front teeth with his tongue. “For _who_ , though? The King?”

“I’m not—”

“And what were you _doing_ out here, anyway?” Harry interjects. “In the woods? On your own? Suspicious, isn’t it?”

“No, that isn’t—I _wasn’t_ —"

“Although, actually, the _real_ question is how much of this you _planned_ ,” he continues, stretching his legs out, leaning back on the tree stump, shifting just enough to draw Parkinson’s attention to the dagger at his hip. None of this is rational. None of this is reasonable. Harry can’t bring himself to care. “The woman—the one who poisoned me—she was a witch, yeah? Was that you, too? Was I ever even actually dead?”

Parkinson flinches. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“Oh, and I’m just supposed to _believe_ that? Believe _you?_ ”

She just stares at him, visibly upset, visibly _aghast_ , floundering for a response—for an explanation—for words—in a way that Harry should find a lot more satisfying than he does; but there’s that same fleeting rasp of regret, of sadness, of _defeat_ , almost, that he’d seen on her face, in her expression, when he’d first woken up, and he hates it.

He _hates_ it.

He hates how it makes him _hesitate_ , hates how it makes him want to _comfort_ her, hates how it makes guilt settle heavy and unsteady in the pit of his stomach.

“Sorry,” he grunts, lowering his gaze, raking his fingers through his hair, kicking out at a clump of moss and dirt and dead leaves. “I shouldn’t have . . . said all of that. Accused you of—well. You aren’t—this isn’t—I wasn’t expecting it. You.”

Parkinson’s bottom lip trembles, just for a moment, before she catches it between her teeth. “Which you were expecting less?”

“Excuse me?”

“Which,” she says again, more stridently, “were you expecting less? True Love? Or me?”

Harry startles at the question.

And it’s perplexing—it’s _maddening_ —but the answer, the distinction between the two, between True Love and Pansy Parkinson; it feels important. It feels like something he should _know_.

He isn’t sure he does know, though, and before he can figure it out, a brisk, early evening breeze is whistling through the clearing, rustling the trees, the grass, the oiled canvas flap of his tent. Parkinson shivers, tightly wrapping her arms around herself, looking equally irritated and miserable. And cold.

And Harry—

Harry is consumed by a sudden and utterly absurd urge to go and cover her with his cloak. To ward off the chill. To somehow—someway—inexplicably—heroically— _warm her up_. He tamps it down, of course, and with such vicious, single-minded urgency that it’s a miracle he doesn’t bite through his own tongue, but the fact that the impulse exists at all is, frankly, alarming.

“Right, well, the rabbit is burning,” Parkinson informs him snidely, after the silence has become almost overwhelmingly awkward. “You should probably do something about that.”

 

* * *

 

She isn’t wrong, is the thing.

 

* * *

 

Harry is lying flat on his back on the hard-packed ground, vaguely anxious and wholly sleep-deprived, scattered clusters of small, jagged rocks digging into his spine, when he hears a faint clopping sound.

A horse appears in his periphery, meandering forward to nose around the grass by his boots.

She’s a pretty horse—a slender, snowy white mare with a tawny brown stripe on her muzzle—but she’s also an unfamiliar horse. A strange horse. And, if the quality of the craftsmanship of her buttery leather saddle is any indication, she’s an _important_ horse. The kind of horse that can’t go missing without a lot of people noticing.

Harry gingerly sits up, scrubbing at the stubble on his jaw, and squints.

The horse just gnaws on another blade of grass.

“Parkinson!” Harry calls out, stretching his arms over his head and yawning. “Parkinson, do you happen to have—”

A shrill, panicked, muffled scream pierces the air.

Harry is instantly on his feet, watchful and wary, dagger in hand, his pounding headache and his sore muscles and his constant, low-simmering frustration all but forgotten as he charges into the tent.

Parkinson is hovering in the corner nearest to the entrance, her face pale and her hair mussed and her wide blue eyes pinned fearfully to a spot on the bedroll. On _Harry’s_ bedroll. Her fingers are splayed over her mouth, and she’s wearing considerably less clothing than she was the night before.

Harry hates himself, just a little, for even noticing.

“What is it?” he demands, body primed and ready and aching for a _fight_. A good fight. A bloody fight. “Parkin—Pansy. _Pansy_. What is it?”

She glances up at him, one of the straps of her chemise slipping down her shoulder, exposing the sharp, fragile line of her collarbone, and then darts over, three quick steps, ducking behind him and clutching at his elbow and pressing herself right up against his side, pleasantly warm and impossibly soft and—

“It was _crawling_ on me,” Parkinson chokes out. “It was—it was _touching_ me.”

Harry cranes his neck, gaze flicking wildly around the tent. “What was? Is it—a snake? Something magical? Poisonous? Did it _bite_ you? Are you alright? Do you need me to—”

“No, but—”

“Where did it go?”

Parkinson jerks her chin towards the bedroll. “It’s still—it’s there. Over there. Don’t you see it?”

Harry inches closer, grip tightening around the hilt of his dagger, and then stops.

Stares.

Stares _harder_.

“Pansy,” he says blankly.

“Is it gone?”

“ _Pansy_.”

“What?”

He turns, slightly, to stare at _her_. “I thought you were being _attacked_.”

“I _was!_ ”

“Oh, _come on_.”

“No, _you_ come on, you were the one who said—yesterday— _there’s insects, Parkinson_ ,” she mimics meanly. “ _They_ bite.”

“I did not mean—” Exasperated, Harry gestures with his dagger to the spot where the spider—the _small_ spider, no bigger than his thumbnail, spindly and innocuous and about as harmless as a butterfly—is scuttling across the bedroll. “ _That_.”

Pansy narrows her eyes, taking a deep breath and lifting her chin—

And Harry lunges towards her, clapping his free hand over her mouth and mostly accidentally drawing her into an _embrace_ , crushing her against his chest, his _bare_ chest, because the buttons on his shirt are still only partially done up and the laces on his breeches are still only partially tied—not that it _matters_ , at all, even a little bit.

“Do you hear that?” he asks, a fresh wave of adrenaline hammering at his pulse. “Is that—”

“Voices,” she whispers, lips grazing his palm. It tickles. It— _irks_. “Soldiers.”

_“That was the horse, wasn’t it?”_ A gruffly accented man shouts from outside the tent—from the opposite side of the clearing. “ _The white one?”_

Harry tenses. “Yours?”

Pansy gives him a tiny nod. “I let her go after I found you yesterday, I thought she’d go back to—I didn’t think she’d _follow_ me.”

_“Is anyone even here?”_ Another man drawls, and there’s a thumping sound, like something heavy’s been overturned. _“Not exactly fit for a princess, is it?”_

Harry’s mind races.

The tent is staked to the ground, but he can cut a hole in the back, maybe, for them to escape. Except they’re in the middle of the clearing, not near the tree line, so they’d need the soldiers to be looking elsewhere. They’d need a distraction. A diversion.

“Alright,” Harry sighs, straightening his shoulders and raising his dagger and leveling a somewhat shaky glare at the entrance to the tent. “Alright, I’ll go out and hold them off while you run towards—”

“ _No_.”

“ _Yes._ ”

“I will _not_ allow you to martyr yourself before it’s absolutely necessary!”

“What does that—they’re here for me, not you, and there isn’t another way out!”

“ _No_ , they’re here for _me_ , you—you stubborn, hapless, oblivious _imbecile_ —you’re _dead,_ remember?”

Harry blinks. “Wait, what?”

“You think the King—the King’s _men_ —you think they just let me _leave_ the castle? By myself? Just like that?”

Outside, there’s a guffaw of loud, masculine laughter, the whistling crunch of an arrow being playfully shot into a tree trunk, and Harry licks his lips, admittedly more nervous than he’d like to be.

He’s already died once.

He doesn’t particularly want to do it again.

“I didn’t really . . . I didn’t think about it,” he mumbles. “Why wouldn’t you be allowed to leave?”

Pansy pauses. “It’s different now.”

“Different how—”

She cuts him off by clapping _her_ hand over _his_ mouth. “Shut _up_.”

_“—ought to check the tent, eh?”_ One of the soldiers calls from the clearing. _“Be thorough?”_

Pansy lowers her hand, her face ashen, her brows knitted together, her expression frozen with something like fear, like reluctance, like desperation and determination and—

Harry meets her eyes, and she pushes herself up on her toes and hooks an arm around his neck, closing off the remaining distance between them.

“Do you trust me?” she asks into his ear, barely audible.

Incredulous, he jerks back. “No!”

“Fine,” she hisses. “Do you at least trust me not to want you _dead?_ ”

“Again, _no!_ ”

The sound of chainmail clanging against armor rattles ominously closer, and Pansy bunches her fingers up in the fabric of Harry’s shirt. She looks uncertain. She looks scared. She looks furious. She looks _reckless_. It’s an odd combination, to be sure, but it’s a recognizable one, too—because he’s seen it enough times in the mirror, before and after skirmishes and battles and raids on Voldemort’s old hideout, before the bastard crowned himself King—

Harry spares a split-second to marvel at that.

At _her_.

“You need to kiss me,” Pansy says, matter-of-fact, and the bottom falls out of his stomach.

“I need to _what?_ ”

“True Love, isn’t it?” She smiles at him, forced and a little tremulous, and shrugs. “There’s a lot of magic left.”

“I don’t—” He loosens his grip on his dagger. “How do you know that?”

Footsteps halt in front of the tent, accompanied by the snick of a crossbow being cocked and the slither of a broadsword being drawn, but Pansy doesn’t answer.

And Harry thinks, abruptly, about his parents.

About the witch in the woods with the basket full of red apples, about the trickle of poison into his veins and the totality of the ensuing darkness and the story she’d told him, the one about the noble knight and his bride daring to defy Fate’s plans for them until they couldn’t, until not even True Love could save them—

Harry sets his jaw.

Sheathes his dagger.

Sweeps Pansy into a kiss.

Her lips don’t move against his, not for one heartbeat, then two, then _three_ , but then she seems to sway forward, a quiet, fractured, improbably sweet breath escaping, and his hand moves from her shoulder to the back of her head to the nape of her neck, catching, cradling, so much more gently than he ever could have imagined he’d be.

He's kissing her like he means it.

He’s kissing her like it’s real.

And it is, Harry reflects, quite a bit _more_ of a kiss—real or otherwise, True Love or not—than is strictly, technically necessary.

Strictly.

Technically.

 

* * *

 

She kisses him _back_ , is the thing.

 

* * *

 

Harry doesn’t feel the magic do its work, not explicitly, but he recognizes the aftermath of it well enough.

A glint.

A shimmer.

A tangible, transformative sort of _shift_ in the air, the remnants of a discarded future gradually evaporating while Fate rethreads its needle, reshuffles its deck of cards, throws its next pair of dice; and there’s the scream, far-off in the woods, distant enough to ambiguously warble, to carry itself with eerie, bulls-eye precision on the tail-end of a particularly gusty breeze, but close enough, too, to pique the soldiers’ interest.

It’s the magic, probably, that has them lowering their weapons.

It’s the magic, probably, that has them congenially agreeing to abandon their search of Harry’s camp.

It’s the magic, probably, that has them marching away, armor clinking, voices fading, until the only sound in the clearing—in the tent—is Pansy’s reed-thin gasp when she wrenches herself out of Harry’s arms and stumbles backwards, her hand outstretched as if to keep him from following her.

And his lips are tingling again, just like before, and his thoughts are jumbled, disorganized, stacked one on top of the other, and his vision is sharp, unexpectedly so, like he’s finally, _finally,_ noticing all the subtle, inconsequential details that make her less of an idea to him—and a bad one, at that—and more of a _person_.

The pinched, ever-so-slightly crooked slant of her mouth is because she’s _angry_ , he thinks, with no small measure of fascination, and the wire-trap tension in her jaw, in the quivering pulse at the base of her neck; it’s because she’s embarrassed. Her eyes, though. Her eyes are _sad_ , even if she’s trying her best to hide it.

“What’s wrong?” Harry asks, bewildered. “They’re gone. We’re—we’re safe. Why are you upset?”

“Why do you _care?_ ” Pansy snaps.

“Um.” He rakes his fingers through his hair, scalp prickling with annoyance. “Am I not supposed to?”

“Why is that a question?”

“I don’t know,” he bites out. “You tell me.”

She sniffs, haughtily, and very obviously avoids making eye contact with him. “You don’t have to _pretend_ , is my _point_.”

“Oh, because _you’ve_ been so honest with _me?_ ” he retorts, before he can stop himself, and—

Her breath catches.

Her lips part.

Her chin wobbles.

She looks like she’s about to cry, honestly, and Harry can’t stand it. Can’t _stomach_ it. He’s been acquainted with Pansy Parkinson, with some _version_ of Pansy Parkinson, for over half his life. He’s never liked her—has, in fact, spent an inordinate amount of time actively _disliking_ her—but he’s also never quite been able to ignore her, either, and he has a disconcerting number of startlingly clear, startlingly vivid memories to prove it.

Her giggles, high-pitched and awful, echoing around the Great Hall whenever the royal delegation from Durmstrang visited.

Her fleeting proclivity for pink dresses and slippers and hair ribbons and cosmetics the year they were fourteen.

How she always ate the blackberries out of the servants’ baskets before they could deliver them to the kitchens in the summer, and how she always picked the songs about knights rescuing defenseless, innocent _unicorns_ , not ladies, when it was her turn to perform for the old King, and how she was always just a bit cleverer and funnier and slyer than it seemed like she _should_ be, given the circumstances.

Mostly, he remembers her from the night Voldemort’s army stormed the castle—the lightning scabbing over the sky, illuminating her pale, drawn face—and the single sticky, swamp-thick beat of silence that rang out, clapping against his eardrums, before she fell to her knees and surrendered.

Before she _gave up_.

Harry puffs his cheeks out, shoulders slumping. “What were you doing here yesterday, Pansy?” he asks tiredly. “In the woods?”

A muscle jumps in Pansy’s throat. “I was riding my horse.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“I didn’t, don’t be absurd.”

“How did you know to _kiss_ me?” Harry presses, taking a cautious step forward.

She doesn’t move away again. “After you ran off the last time—”

“After I _escaped_ , you mean.”

“Right. That.”

“Pansy.”

“He wouldn’t—he didn’t let us—we were prisoners,” she stammers, tucking an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “All of us. Everyone. It didn’t matter who . . . it didn’t matter what titles anyone had, or whose family’s gold he was spending, we were all—stuck. Trapped.”

“I gathered, yeah. What does—”

“There was a Seer,” Pansy continues loudly, talking over him. “In the east tower. She had a vision.”

Harry frowns. “A . . . Seer?”

“I thought it was rather ridiculous, too, but—she told me,” Pansy says slowly, crisply, like she’s weighing her words even as she speaks them, “that it was all going to get worse, not better. That the King was mad with power, and that he was going to eventually grow bored with tormenting the peasants and the rebels and move onto nobles. Courtiers. People like my—”

“People like _you_.”

Pansy stiffens. “That’s . . . fair.”

“And where do I fit into this _vision_ , then?”

Her eyelashes flutter, like she’s wrestling with some impulse, some deeply-rooted and pristinely-bred _instinct_ , to shut her eyes. To keep them shut. “You were dead.”

Harry struggles not to flinch at that, rocking back on his heels and crossing his arms over his chest and cracking his knuckles. Fidgeting. “Yeah. I know that part. Pretty well, actually.”

“No, I mean—in the vision, in one of the futures, you were _dead_ ,” she repeats, more emphatically. “You were dead, and everything was _horrible_. My father was dead. Draco, Daphne, even—even the steward, the grumpy one, Snape—they were all dead, and I was _married_ to—"

“I get it,” Harry interrupts. “You were alive, but nobody else was. I take it there’s a second future? One where I’m _not_ dead?”

Pansy nods, almost imperceptibly.  

“Fate doesn’t usually do that, does it?” he asks. “Offer choices?”

“The vision . . . she showed me, on a map, where you were going to die,” Pansy says, haltingly. “In the woods. The exact—the exact spot. And it had to be me to find you, and it had to be me to kiss you, and we’d have to—” She breaks off, her mouth twisting with something complicated. Something wistful. “Three times. True Love would save us three times, and that’s how we’d know when to return to the castle.”

Harry stares at her, helpless, appalled, his chest tightening with a vicious stab of his own—something complicated. Something wistful. “Three times. That’s . . . specific.”

“Yes.”

“So . . . just now, with the—the soldiers. That was the second time?”

“I think so, yeah.”

Harry swallows. “What happened after that? In the vision?”

“We miraculously arrive at the castle just as the rebels and their new army are preparing to attack,” Pansy murmurs, oddly reticent. “And then you lead them inside. And then you kill the King. And then we . . .”

Harry waits, frozen, his gaze pinned to her face. “And then we?”

“And then we . . . we win,” Pansy finishes, coughing daintily. “That’s it.”

He stares at her some more, the moments stretching out and out and out, syrupy and slow—

She wets her lips, glancing up at him, and an ethereal sort of _quiet_ settles over the tent, muting the birds chirping in the trees and the wind whistling through the skies and the heat, the weight, the thriving, aching rush of blood to his head, pounding, thumping, reminding him that he’s still alive, he’s still _breathing_ , and he has one more chance.

One more _real_ chance.

He can’t fathom wasting it.

He reaches out to brush a stray strand of hair off her shoulder, his knuckles grazing her cheek. “Right,” he says thickly, holding out his hand for her, palm up, like he’s conceding a swordfight and all he’s missing is the blade. “One more question.”

“What?”

“How does it all end for _us?_ Me and you? After we get rid of the King?”

Pansy hesitates, studying his hand, and then carefully—deliberately—threads their fingers together. Her skin is soft. Tender. Delicate. Because she’s a princess, a real one, not a scheming, pillaging, conquering imposter like Voldemort, and Harry never thought he would notice something like that, would care about something like that, but it’s _different_ , suddenly.

Jarring.

Pansy Parkinson—pampered, prissy, vapid, spoiled, _sheltered_ Pansy Parkinson—hearing and seeing and realizing the very worst possible future for herself, for her _kingdom—_ marching right out of the life she knew best and directly into the one she didn’t, just for a _chance_ to change it. To fix it. To save it.

Once upon a time, Harry wanted to do that, too.

Maybe he still does.

Maybe he still _will_. 

“We live happily ever after,” Pansy whispers, her voice trembling with the barest, briefest, most magical hint of laughter. It sounds like a victory. Harry reckons it’ll taste even better. “Like a fairytale.”

 

* * *

 

She’s absolutely going to be right, is the thing.

 

* * *

 


End file.
